About My Meds, My Self

My Meds, My Self discusses the experience of taking psychiatric meds, with a focus on long-term use, as opposed to people new to medication treatment altogether.

“In my experience, there’s lots of information available for people in the latter category to help them adjust to psychiatric drugs,” says Kaitlin Bell Barnett, author and blogger, “but there’s very little for people who are supposed to be old hands at it.

“The blog will focus on everything from the quotidian, such as dealing with side effects, to the existential (“Am I still the same person I was before I began taking the medication”?). Any aspect of everyday life will be open for examination: The challenges of deciding whether to reveal to friends, family and employers that one is taking medication, how one justifies continuing the drugs or stopping them, the relationship one has with the prescribing doctor, how taking meds affects self-esteem and self-efficacy.

“Since medication in young people is a controversial topic, I’d like to have a particular focus on children’s, teens’ and young adults’ experiences of the drugs, the idea being that people debate the wisdom of medicating kids but rarely ask the kids themselves.”

Kaitlin Bell Barnett is a journalist living in Brooklyn. Her first book, Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up, comes out in April from Beacon Press. It focuses on the experiences of young adults — herself included — who spent their formative years taking psychiatric medication.